Skeptical Creationists?

A new study from Calvin College sociologist Jonathan Hill, sponsored by BioLogos, is calling into question some previously commonly held understandings about Americans’ beliefs when it comes to creationism.

Just for some context, for the last 30 years, Gallup has polled Americans using several broad questions to gauge their overall beliefs concerning God and creation, and as Slate notes, the percentage who say “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” has never been lower than 40 percent. But the new survey used some different polling methodology, and it garnered some very different results.

Instead of just asking which one of three broad statements they agreed with, the new survey asked a variety of questions regarding creationism, along with what degree of certainty respondents believe them. The Slate article does a great job of analyzing the numbers, and it found only 7 percent of those polled were “very certain” of all five of the following basic beliefs associated with young-Earth creationism: God created the world in six 24-hour days, God created humans miraculously, humans didn’t evolve from other life forms, Adam and Eve were actual people and the Earth is only 10,000 years old.